Staff MemberPremium Member

If you are a data-junky on Verizon and happen to live in New York City, you might perk up when you hear about Big Red's new network upgrades. They are testing their new double-wide LTE network in that city and supposedly hitting speeds of 80Mbps. This new network tech basically is achieved because Verizon can double up on their frequencies and are deploying on a full 40 MHz of spectrum. Verizon is able to do this because it purchased most of the cable operators' 4G licenses sometime in 2012.

This new network testing was found out by a mobile network tracker named Milan Milanovic who just happened to be carrying around a handheld spectrum analyzer and noticed the new speeds. He was even able to force his current 4G phone on to the new network to do some testing, which is how he figured out it is hitting 80Mbps speeds currently. It's important to note that these speeds were achieved on a network without any other users on it. These speeds should drop once it is saturated with customers. Still, it's pretty impressive to see how much Verizon is improving LTE network speeds. Share your thoughts.

I remember my first PC (a Commodore VIC-20 - 33 years ago this January), with the external 150 baud modem.

Next was the Commodore 64, and then the 128, and finally the Amiga...and from there it was off to the races.

The Commodore 64 still holds the record for highest quantity of one type of computer ever sold! Sales peaked at around 17 million units sold! Even today, no one has been able to match that number.

So, 150 baud - yes, that's essentially 150bps since at that time, the binary digit was being transmitted, just 0s and 1s. Of course, that was a fully wired modem, connected through the basic telephone wall jack - not too dissimilar in operation to the still very antiquated FAX protocol.

So let's see, 80Mbps is approximately 555,000 times faster, not to mention communicating wirelessly...and on a handheld smartphone device. WOW.

By the way, 150 baud isn't all that much faster than the 110 baud rate for the first commercially available modem introduced in the late 1950s by AT&T (remember them?). Pictured below it was a monster in size, all just to send what were nothing more than short sentences.

He's a regular poster on another cell phone forum. Back when Verizon first rolled out LTE in NYC, he was regularly hitting just shy of 60 Mbps. Of late, Verizon has been dealing with pretty severe capacity issues in midtown Manhattan, but once you go outside of that area to other parts of Manhattan and the other boroughs, you can still get pretty good speeds. During the summer, I was at the upper west side during the middle of the weekday (in the 80's), which is about 2 miles north of the congested areas of midtown Manhattan where people are complaining that their LTE speeds, when they can connect, is less than the promised 5 Mbps. I had no issues connecting and the speedtest results on my Note 2 was showing that I was getting download speeds of between 40-45 Mbps.

Yeah but VZW could potentially save money doing this in lieu of upgrading to LTE-A (though not sure what is involved in that upgrade).

Such speeds are kind of pointless with minimal data allowances. These faster speeds theoretically double or triple capacity, but then only like half of cell phone users are on smartphone data (not to mention growth in tablets). And then you have the constraint of actual spectrum.

So now people can exhaust their 2 gig per month allowance in just a few minutes!!!

Click to expand...

Yep..so now the spin will be "Hey you guys still on 'Unlimited Data', come and buy this new phone that uses our new, super fast, network...you can get upwards of three minutes of data usage, per month, for only twice what you are currently paying...that sounds awesome, right?"